Celebrating 50 Years:

The Eisenhower Interstate Highway System

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PURPOSE

This hearing is intended to provide Members of the Committee with the history, its impact, and the future outlook of the Interstate Highway System.

BACKGROUND

June 29^th will mark the 50^th anniversary of the federal law that brought America its unparalleled Interstate Highway System, a project that earned the honor of being one of the “Seven Wonders of the United States” by the American Society of Civil Engineers. This 46,876-mile web of superhighways, which is the world’s largest public works project, has transformed our nation and our economy. It is a symbol of freedom and a tribute to human ingenuity.

As America entered the 20^th Century, good roads, even paved roads, were not common. Roads might lead outward from cities, even to state lines, but there was no guarantee they would meet other roads in adjacent states. Road systems were not marked any better than they were built, so it was not uncommon for travelers to get lost as they attempted to drive early automobiles from town to town, and it was even more likely for cars and bicycles to get stuck in mud on unpaved roads.

Plans for a national system of expressways were developed in 1944 by the National Highway Committee, appointed by President Franklin Roosevelt, and headed by Chief of the Bureau of Public Roads, Thomas H. MacDonald. The plan called for a system of 33,900 miles of expressways and 5,000 miles of auxiliary routes.

Congress designated the 40,000-mile National System of Interstate Highways in 1944, but funding would not be authorized until 1952, when President Harry Truman signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1952 offering a token down payment of $25 million for the Interstates. It would be up to President Dwight David Eisenhower to lead the campaign for funding sufficient to build the nation's Interstate System.

Eisenhower personally witnessed the need for a national highway system in 1919. As a lieutenant colonel in the Army, he helped staff a coast-to-coast convoy of 81 military vehicles. The 1919 journey was a long and often lousy trip—62 days of heat, breakdowns, mud, bridgeless river-crossings, and rough roads. Where bridges did exist, the heavy military vehicles often broke through bridge decks (more than 55,000 bridges would have to be built to complete the Interstate Highway System). With 3,251 miles to cover between Washington, D.C. and San Francisco, California, the convoy set a record pace—58 miles a day at about 6 mph. On today's Interstate highway, such a trip could be done in less than a week, covering more ground in an hour than the 1919 military convoy needed a whole day to traverse.

During the journey, Lt. Col. Eisenhower decided the United States desperately needed a better highway system. That conviction was only reinforced during World War II, when Eisenhower used Germany's efficient autobahn system to move U.S. troops with lightning speed deep into Germany, putting the German army on the run.

Although a system of special interstate highways had been discussed as early as the Roosevelt Administration in the 1940s, Eisenhower made it a keystone of his domestic agenda when he came into office in the mid-1950s. He named General Lucius Clay to work with a federal Interagency committee and the Bureau of Public Roads to assess needs, estimate costs and make recommendations on how to fund the construction of the system. Francis "Frank" C. Turner, who would later oversee much of the construction of the Interstate as head of the Bureau of Public Roads, served as Executive Secretary.

Although the Clay Committee's report, A Ten-Year National Highway Program, documented the funding needs, Congress failed to embrace its financing recommendation, which proposed that the system be paid for with bonds. The President's plan went down to defeat in July 1955.

Unwilling to accept a defeat, Eisenhower resumed his campaign in 1956. Creation of a new tax-based financing plan, with the federal government bearing the lion's share of construction costs, and a new map including urban interstates paved the way for passage of the program in the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956. The bill that was to change the face of America was signed by Eisenhower without fanfare in a hospital room at Walter Reed Army Medical Center where he was recovering from illness.

Today, Americans continue to reap the benefits of that legislation. The wide, relatively straight roadways in the Interstate Highway System were designed to be faster and safer than the two-lane roads that preceded them. And the system has brought amazing changes to our way of life:

It has put Americans within a few days' drive of practically every location in the continental United States, altering our willingness to travel and the way we schedule our time.
It has revved our economy, forever changing the way we move people and freight
It has facilitated international trade
It has stretched the link between homes and jobs and has redefined the relationship between urban and rural America.

And yet, the interstate system, which accounts for only one percent of the Nation’s total road mileage but carries over 20% of the Nation’s traffic, has come to be taken for granted. As the interstate supports over 60,000 people per route-mile per day, which is 26 times the amount of all other roads and 22 times that of the passenger rail service, many Americans no longer experience it as the "open road" that spurred a generation of novels and films. Population growth has outstripped system expansion, and heavy use has led to congestion and frustration.

	1956	Current
U.S. Population:	168,903,031	293,655,404 (2004)
Annual Vehicle Miles:	627,843,000	2,829,336,000 (2002)
Federal Gas Tax:	3 cents	18.4 cents (last raised 4.3 cents in 1993)
Registered Vehicles:	54,013,753	135,669,897 (2003)
Registered Trucks:	10,678,612	94,943,551 (2003)